Extremely Lame

I got into a pretty heated discussion earlier this evening that my lizard brain was interpreting as “Men are emotionally dead horndogs whereas women are feeling and caring creatures incapable of fault.” Mind you, on the first part of it, my lizard brain was pretty accurately interpreting what was being said to me. It’s the latter part that sort of got retroactively added as a sort of counterbalance to the first part.

When I pointed out that I’m not like that, they agreed and said, “Oh, you’re all right, it’s just those other men that are pigs.” I’ve heard arguments like that from my parents before, and I’m pretty sure I don’t like where that road goes.

Eventually as sort of détante was reached when certain people in the argument concurred, some begrudgingly, that the men are pigs stereotype seemed to be much more prevalent among older men than it does among younger men. To me, this isn’t that surprising.

Pretty much as civilization has matured, things that we thought were completely scandalous a generation ago are pretty much seen as ho-hum now. Just look at the list of things from the past century that were supposed to bring about the end to civilization.

• Women being allowed to vote
• Jazz
• Desegregation
• Comic books
• Rock and roll
• Interracial couples
• Feminism
• Dungeons & Dragons
• Heavy metal
• Doom
• Rap music
• Grand Theft Auto III
• Gay marriage.

I’m sure I left quite a few of them out. But the point remains that things that seemed wrong and scary only a generation ago doesn’t seem so bad anymore and we can’t even understand how people could have ever possibly been against it.

Forgive my digression. Allow me to return to the meat of the post, the fact that the older generation of men tends to much more easily fall into that stereotype of the emotionally dead zombie that craves only sex than the younger generation does. I have a theory as to why this is.

People of my generation and younger are far, far more likely to have been raised in an environment where both parents worked full time. One just can’t live on one income anymore. Relationships are seen more as partnerships rather than a mild master/slave relationship. Because of this, people of my generation tend to live in an environment where household responsibilities are shared between the two parents; the father isn’t the sole breadwinner and the mother isn’t the sole hearthkeeper. This fluidity of traditional gender roles has allowed boys to grow up into men where the taciturn, stoic father figure act gets replaced with one that is more comfortable discussing one’s feelings and is more empathetic to the feelings of others.

Conversely, because of this same fluidity, girls aren’t just raised being told they can do anything; they are raised to actually believe it. They aren’t taught to be silent and submissive and “ladylike” (even though society is still pushing back pretty damn hard on that point); instead, they’re far more likely to be adamant in voicing their opinions in a wide range of taboo topics, and they aren’t waiting until they’re in their 30s before doing so.

So, just as the stereotype of the meek and timid woman who is constantly deferring to her husband or father figure is going the way of the dodo, so is the stereotype of the stern, passionless man for whom sex is merely a physical act that is more reminiscent of animals mating than humans coupling.